Linked List: June 2013

Friday, 28 June 2013

My thanks to Collaborate for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Collaborate is an easy-to-use, easy-to-understand, powerful tool for team collaboration and project management — all from a single, simple app.

You can set up the entire thing — from creating your account, inviting members, and creating private collaboration “Rooms” — entirely from your iPhone. They started with a mobile-first mindset, and it really shows. Collaborate is a great app, with some nice little touches. You can share from Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, or email. Comments, likes, dislikes, notifications — everything you need for private, team collaboration.

Thursday, 27 June 2013

“Alright, time for everyone to use the bathroom,” my father used
to say on road trips. “But I don’t have to,” was the inevitable
whine from (at least) one of us kids. Dad’s reply was always the
same: “It wasn’t a question.”

My dad was focused on being as efficient as possible, of course.
Instead of stopping for just one person to pee and then getting
back on the road, it makes way more sense to have everyone pee at
each stop. That at least prevents the inevitable inefficiency
introduced ten minutes later when the next person feels nature
urging them along.

The good news is that the developer community has come through,
and there are now several compelling alternatives to Google
Reader, though all are far from complete. And our previous
favorite, Feedly, even has some new flair to share. I’ve sorted
through the competition to find the best choices that work for
multiple platforms, have third-party support, and, if possible,
follow sustainable business models.

The theme is clear: iOS 7’s UI requires some of Apple’s biggest
strengths, and efforts to copy it will be hindered by some of
Android’s biggest weaknesses.

iOS 7 is also going to be a problem for cross-platform frameworks.
Fewer assumptions can be made about the UI widgets and behaviors
common to all major platforms. And any UI targeting the least
common denominator will now look even more cheap and dated on iOS
7, since the new standard on the OS is so far from the old one.

Businessweek’s Peter Burrows writes a story that says Apple’s new TV commercial is a dud. His source: “Ace Metrix Inc., a consulting firm that analyzes the effectiveness of TV ads through surveys of at least 500 TV viewers”.

When talking about the design and development of Vesper, we’ve mentioned that Brent Simmons built a custom system that allowed me and Dave Wiskus to tweak the design — colors, spacing, sizing, fonts, corner radiuses, etc. — by editing values in a simple plist file. A simple CSS-like system for iOS design.

Let’s say we worked at Apple, and were challenged with designing
an experience that was impossible in 2007. Something that would be
entirely impossible with web technology. What would our futuristic
UI look like?

It would have compositing effects that need serious GPU
horsepower. Blur is a beautiful but computationally intensive
operation, so we’d use it liberally. To push it further, the
blurred areas will need to update during scrolling and update
at 60 fps.

Even more importantly, FM/AM paid him NOTHING for the performance
of the song. Unlike most industrialized nations, terrestrial radio
stations in the US have never paid performers anything. It’s hard
to believe, but true: they can play John Coltrane’s version of “My
Favorite Things” for decades and never pay him or his estate a
single cent.

Lowery doesn’t disclose the Pandora performance royalty but he
declares it “unsustainable.” This is a fascinating perspective:
apparently in Lowery’s view a performance royalty of $1,275 is
unsustainable but the AM/FM world of $0 is totally fine?

One ruling overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, the
bill passed in 1996 that ruled same-sex marriages
unconstitutional. The other decision left intact a lower-court
ruling that invalidated California’s Prop. 8 ban on same-sex
marriage.

“Apple strongly supports marriage equality and we consider it a
civil rights issue. We applaud the Supreme Court for its decisions
today,” an Apple spokesman told AllThingsD in a statement.

Google, in typical Google fashion, has had fun with its statement
of support for same-sex couples. Type the word “gay”, “lesbian”,
“transgender” or “bisexual” into Google’s search bar, and the box
quickly morphs into a pride-colored rainbow, a not-so-subtle
showing of celebration.

Tuesday, 25 June 2013

The bookseller said Tuesday that losses at its Nook digital business more than doubled in the quarter ended April 27, easily wiping out profits generated at its bookstores. As a result, Barnes & Noble said it would stop producing its own color tablets, in favor of co-branded devices made by third-party manufacturers.

But while that shaky video that I took on the roof was definitely steeped in reality and definitely true to the moment, it wasn’t the version of the night that I wanted to remember or share with my Instagram friends.

That’s because Instagram isn’t about reality – it’s about a well-crafted fantasy, a highlights reel of your life that shows off versions of yourself that you want to remember and put on display in a glass case for other people to admire and browse through. It’s why most of the photographs uploaded to Instagram are beautiful and entertaining slices of life and not the tedious time in-between of those moments, when bills get paid, cranky children are put to bed, little spats with friends.

Affordances are the baby to skeuomorphism’s bathwater. When they engage our instincts just right, they create an emotional bond, and the unfamiliar becomes inviting. Without them, it’s just pictures under glass.

Or consider MarsEdit, which downloads posts from your blog. That’s
by far the most important part of sync for a blog editor (though I
could understand wanting to sync your drafts).

But the lack of an iOS version of MarsEdit is considered a
sync bug.

I’m fine with this. “Syncing” now means not just syncing itself
but the creation of multiple versions of an app that sync.

Just a few years ago, web app proponents promised a future where everything would be a web app, “write once, run everywhere” would really work this time. But the truth, it turns out, is that people want more different native apps than ever before. And web apps too.

Monday, 24 June 2013

I went looking for a reasonably recently updated list of dev
resources to link to from the article. Couldn’t find one I was
happy with, then remembered that we included a pretty solid list
at the end of the book Beginning iOS 6 Development. Since that
list needed to be updated for the iOS 7 rev of the book, I
thought, why not pop the list into a blog post. And here we are.

Soon you will be hearing from Pandora how they need Congress to
change the way royalties are calculated so that they can pay much
much less to songwriters and performers. For you civilians
webcasting rates are “compulsory” rates. They are set by the
government (crazy, right?). Further since they are compulsory
royalties, artists can not “opt out” of a service like Pandora
even if they think Pandora doesn’t pay them enough.

I wrote some advice in an interview with App Camp For Girls
recently, “Find something in your life that is broken and write
software to fix it.” The best software is personal. It’s something
you need. It heals a wound in your life and makes you happy.

As discovered by 9to5Mac reader RY, Siri will ask for help
pronouncing a name if it has trouble understanding you the first
time you pronounce a name. In addition, we have found that you can
simply say, “That’s not how you pronounce [any name]” and Siri
will go through the learning process.

Google prepares a new service that’s called Google Mine. It’s
integrated with Google+ and it’s a way to keep track of the items
you own or you’d like to have and share some of them with your
circles. Right now, the service is tested internally at Google.

Just tell Google everything you own and everything you’re interested in or like. Sure.

Ron Miller, a former art director for NASA, used digital trickery to superimpose scale drawings of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune over the same landscape, highlighting the sheer size of the planets.

The incredible drawings imagine each planet to be 233,812 miles from Earth - the same distance at which the moon orbits.

My concerns over iOS 7 preparations lingered during WWDC, but once
I returned home I realized my mistake. In fact, there is already
an app in the App Store from which I can draw inspiration for this
new style. An app that adopts the look and feel of iOS 7 by
elevating the content over the chrome. An app that uses color and
animation in the style of iOS 7 to clarify content. I realized
that, for all intents and purposes, Vesper is the first iOS 7 app
in the App Store. Despite being an iOS 6 app, Vesper adopts the
major idioms of iOS 7 and serves as a great example of how
developers can adopt those same idioms and still retain an
individual identity for their app.

This made my day, but allow me to put my humble hat on for a moment, and praise two apps that foreshadowed iOS 7 long before Vesper: Letterpress and Twitterrific 5. I’ve been a TweetBot man for quite a while, but on my iOS 7 testing device, I find Twitterrific is the only Twitter client that feels right at home.

During my recent talk at AltWWDC, I was asked what makes a good QA
person. I think I said, “Doggedness.” Which in my personal lexicon
is high praise. (When I think about my own abilities, I know full
well that they exist only because I keep chasing sticks and don’t
ever stop, not out of any innate talent.)

Here’s the thing about Nick: I think he’s convinced that there’s
another bug. And he’ll keep going till he finds it. And, once he
finds it, he’s convinced that there’s another bug.

Here’s the thing: The appeal of one type of color treatment over
another is culturally determined. Apple’s super bright iOS 7
colors tend to shock Europeans and Americans, who favor
increasingly dark, bleak, post-apocolyptic color schemes. (Just
look at Superman’s new suit!) But super-bright colors like the
ones in iOS 7 are perennial favorites through Asia, including
China and India, and also throughout much of Latin America.

In short, Apple’s color scheme may astonish and disappoint jaded
Northern and Western urban geeks. But these colors will be an
international crowd-pleaser.

This machine fascinates me not because it seems like it’ll make everything I currently do faster. It fascinates me because it’s fundamentally new. There’s only one CPU socket and it bets heavily on the bus and GPU performance. While this looks to software to be just another Mac it isn’t. It’s capabilities aren’t traditional. The CPU is a front end to a couple of very capable massively parallel processors at the end of a relatively fast bus. One of those GPUs isn’t even hooked up to do graphics. I think that’s a serious tell. If you leverage your massively parallel GPU to run a computation that runs even one second and in that time you can’t update your screen, that’s a problem. Have one GPU dedicated to rendering and a second available for serious computation and you’ve got an architecture that’ll feel incredible to work with.

Friday, 21 June 2013

Kuler is a new app for iOS designed for creating, sharing, and finding color themes. It’s very fun, and useful for any designer. It’s connected to Creative Cloud, so you can do things like capture colors from a photo using your iPhone, and then have a color palette based on that image show up in Illustrator. And: Kuler is a free download.

A last-minute scheduling change has opened up next week’s DF RSS feed sponsorship, and there’s one week left in July. If you have a product or service that you’d like to promote to Daring Fireball’s audience of smart, good-looking readers, please do get in touch.

iOS 7 isn’t complete yet, and we can hope that some of the eyesores will get refined (straight into a shallow grave). So, yes, let’s nitpick about icon design, and the apps that still have textures, and whatever else seems off. But Apple has set the overall direction. All that’s left for developers to do is to decide what business they want to be in.

They did this to spite Vine (and Twitter, which owns Vine), not because it makes Instagram better, because it doesn’t make Instagram better, it makes it worse. Slow to load, noise I don’t want, bursts their bubble of simplicity and focus. Thankfully there’s a setting to turn off “Auto-Play Videos”; otherwise I’d abandon ship.

Thursday, 20 June 2013

Comprehensive post-mortem by my colleague Dave Wiskus on the design of Vesper 1.0, replete with copious screenshots and animatics, documenting the entire process and the thinking behind many of our decisions.

Vagueness is the core flaw of the CFAA. As written, the CFAA makes
it a federal crime to access a computer without authorization or
in a way that exceeds authorization. Confused by that? You’re not
alone. Congress never clearly described what this really means. As
a result, prosecutors can take the view that a person who violates
a website’s terms of service or employer agreement should face
jail time.

So lying about one’s age on Facebook, or checking personal email
on a work computer, could violate this felony statute. This flaw
in the CFAA allows the government to imprison Americans for a
violation of a non-negotiable, private agreement that is dictated
by a corporation. Millions of Americans — whether they are of a
digitally native or dial-up generation — routinely submit to
legal terms and agreements every day when they use the Internet.
Few have the time or the ability to read and completely understand
lengthy legal agreements.

“The Sopranos” remains the best television series since the
beginning of the medium, dramatically terrifying, comically richer
than “The Honeymooners,” a series that began with a premise, a
milieu, and a cast that, unlike “Mad Men,” never exhausted itself.
Gandolfini was not the creator of “The Sopranos” — David Chase
was the author of this novel in every way — nor was he a solo
act, like Alec Guinness in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and
“Smiley’s People.” Chase populated his series with actors, like
Edie Falco, and amateur actors, who gave the cast a Fellini-esque
variety and depth. But Gandolfini was the focal point of “The
Sopranos,” the incendiary, sybaritic neurotic who must play the
Godfather at home and at the Bada Bing but knows that everything
— his family, his racket, his way of life — is collapsing all
around him.

Given Markdown’s nature, I came to the realization that it,
however unintentionally, is in fact a wonderful accessibility
tool, because it reduces eye strain while writing. The
simplicity of Markdown’s syntax makes it possible to not have to
look at the screen every time I want to italicize a word or
insert a link. My eyes are more sensitive than most people’s
insofar that I can stare at a screen only so long before fatigue
and pain sets in. The less time I have to look at the screen,
the better my eyes feel. Thus, what makes using Markdown so
great is that I don’t have to waste time trying to locate
buttons or menu options. I just glance down at my keyboard to
ensure I’m pressing the right keys.

A Microsoft representative urged the board to try more than one
product and not to rely on one platform. Doing so could cut off
the district from future price reductions and innovations, said
Robyn Hines, senior director of state government affairs for
Microsoft.

Read that again. A Microsoft representative urging people not to rely on one platform.

Times really have changed.

Wednesday, 19 June 2013

And his work on the show made possible Vic Mackey, Al Swearengen,
Walter White, Don Draper and every complicated, riveting anti-hero
(or worse) who followed him. “The Sopranos” was an enormous hit,
and told the business that the old rules need no longer apply.

Microsoft Corp. was recently in advanced discussions
with Nokia Corp. about a purchase of the Finnish
company’s device business, according to people familiar with the
matter, in a marriage that could have reshaped the mobile-phone
industry.

The talks have faltered, they said. One person said talks took
place as recently as this month but aren’t likely to be revived.

I do not mean to imply to that Neven Mrgan is either foolish or
possessing of a little mind. This is not a straw man argument. I
mean to say that it is foolish for a designer to rely on intuition
to inform design because it yields repetition and blinds them from
new opportunities. A small mind is a limited mind and using
intuition as a guide will yield nothing new, only that which
“feels right.” Or to put it another way, what “feels right” is
what your mind is used to.

Apple is going to let OS X be itself, and let iOS do the same.
Multiple times during the keynote we heard an exec say “ten years”
— in reference to needing a new case design for the Mac Pro or in
coming up with names for OS X. This is awesome news for Mac
developers and what we’ve been wanting to hear for a long time
now. Apple still cares about the Mac and you really felt like they
meant it this year. From the session content to talking with
employees about OS X issues to parity between new frameworks
introduced on iOS and OS X- the Mac is still getting a lot of love
down in Cupertino.

One of my key takeaways from last week is that it’s not just user interface design where Apple has increased collaboration under its post-Jobs/Forstall management structure, but they’ve increased engineering collaboration too. There was far less “iOS this”, “OS X that”, and much more “here’s how you do this on Apple platforms”.

Apple today announced that HBO GO and WatchESPN are now available
directly on Apple TV joining the great lineup of programming
offered to customers. iTunes users have downloaded more than one
billion TV episodes and 380 million movies from iTunes to date,
and they are purchasing over 800,000 TV episodes and over 350,000
movies per day.

The idea was fairly simple, though complex in the making: for
those of us in big metropolitan, light-polluted areas like Chicago
who can’t see the night sky very clearly, we wanted to travel to
this beautiful, dark section of rural Nevada and then bring the
stars back with us, capturing a full night sky to be played back,
in real time.

4K resolution — twice that of most movie theaters.

I need a bigger display.

Tuesday, 18 June 2013

But whether we accept the idea of a grid or not, here’s the bigger
point: no icon designer I’ve asked thinks Ive’s grid is helpful.
In that sense, it’s wrong. The large circle is too big. Many apps
in iOS 7 use it: all the Store apps, Safari, Messages, Photos… In
all these icons, the big shape in the center is simply too big.
Every icon designer I’ve asked would instead draw something like
the icon on the right. To our eyes — and we get paid to have good
ones, we’re told — this is more correct.

Press coverage is disproportionally focusing on the Home screen
(about which more in a moment), but the reality of day to day
usage is that you’ll spend time in apps. Where there were
previously gloomy cubbyholes and low ceilings, there are now
floor-to-ceiling windows, skylights, and clean surfaces.

I think it’s an enormous improvement, and a typically
opinionated move.

Road warriors and jet travellers rejoice, we’ve found a laptop
that will last all day and well into the night. The newest Apple
MacBook Air 13-inch (Mid-2013) lasted an astonishing 15-and-a-half
hours on a battery test that makes most current mainstream
ultrabooks and ultraportables cough and die after four to six
hours. The fact that the system gives up very little if any
day-to-day performance is astounding.

The security state operates as a ratchet. Once you click in a new
level of surveillance or intrusiveness, it becomes the new
baseline. What was unthinkable yesterday becomes permissible in
exceptional cases today, and routine tomorrow. The people who run
the American security apparatus are in the overwhelming majority
diligent people with a deep concern for civil liberties. But their
job is to find creative ways to collect information. And they work
within an institution that, because of its secrecy, is
fundamentally inimical to democracy and to a free society.

Remarkably thoughtful essay; if you read only one thing this week, make it this.

Week-old roundup of day one designer commentary on iOS 7. I was right about one thing: it’s polarizing. Two remarks I very much agree with:

Craig Mod:

What was outlined today looks like a very rational base on which
to extend the OS — somewhat timeless, far more timeless than what
we had before.

Justin Rhoades:

I think the design had to be reset so that newer interaction
models could surface. More gestures, more animations. They added a
physics engine to the SDK. It’s like a pendulum swinging from
obvious visual affordances to engaging kinetic ones. The parallax
effect, the physics of the messages bubbles and I’m sure many
other ‘kinetic’ behaviors are new to devs in iOS7. Apple wants
apps to use more motion and less visual design.

The design and goal is clearly focused on listeners purchasing
music — but even so, iTunes Radio feels like the first truly
modern take on what terrestrial radio wishes it could be. Radio
was always meant to be a promotion tool, a way to sell more music,
but without being built directly on top of the world’s biggest
music retailer, it was always too distant from the marketplace to
be more effectual. Now a “buy” button lives next to every song, or
a wish list one for those hesitant, and it feels like this is how
modern radio should function.

Agreed; iTunes Radio is well-done and well-designed. I’m a little surprised Apple is making everyone wait for iOS 7 to get it.

According to the Financial Times of London (paywall), Richard Yu,
chairman of Huawei’s consumer business group, said at the launch
of its latest smartphone offering, the Ascend P6, in London: “We
are considering these sorts of acquisitions; maybe the combination
has some synergies but depends on the willingness of Nokia.”

I can’t find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an
extended period of time, and hasn’t seen a massive downgrade in
performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I
cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag
of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches
refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions;
and unresponsive apps.

I tried the basics at first, like a factory reset. I then moved onto
drastic measures, like rooting and installing CyanogenMod 10.1
(which I thought would surely fix everything, since I’ve used
faster devices with lesser hardware, and performance problems were
merely a lack of software optimization). And nothing seems to work.

My first-generation iPad from 2010 works just as well as the day I bought it. Actually, even better, because iOS has gotten better.

Update: A lot of pushback from readers on my claim above, arguing that their first-gen iPads have been rendered slow and unstable by iOS 5 (the last OS to support the hardware). My son uses mine for iBooks, watching movies, and playing games. Mileage clearly varies with other apps. (And yes, the App Store app in particular is a bit crashy.)

Brian X. Chen, reporting for the NYT from the e-book price-fixing trial:

Both parties showed their evidence on a projector screen. Apple’s
legal team used a MacBook to shuffle between evidence documents,
stacking them side by side in split screens and zooming in on
specific paragraphs.

In contrast, the Justice Department’s lawyers could show only one
piece of evidence at a time. One video that Mr. Buterman played
as evidence failed to produce the audio commentary needed to make
his point.

The race to the bottom. Deceptive low-now, high-later pricing.
Scam and clone apps. Shallow apps with little craftsmanship that
succeed, but many high-quality apps unable to command a
sustainable price. The “top” list encourages all of these —
we’d still have them without the list, but to a substantially
lesser degree.

Apple has always placed a priority on protecting our customers’
personal data, and we don’t collect or maintain a mountain of
personal details about our customers in the first place. There are
certain categories of information which we do not provide to law
enforcement or any other group because we choose not to retain it.

For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and
FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the
sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt
that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers’
location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form.

In my opinion this has been, from the return of Steve Jobs at
least, the singular goal of Apple. Not to make all the moneys, not
to dominate markets, not to impress bloggers but simply to make
products that enhance our lives.

Apple spent nine months in complete silence — from the release of the iPad Mini through last week. The only thing they announced in that interim was the ouster of Scott Forstall and corresponding reshuffling of executive responsibility. No new products, no new designs. And the business and tech media lost their shit over this, declaring an end to Apple’s ability to innovate. Apple’s “This Is Our Signature” mantra is in defiance of this superficial demand for an endless stream of new new new. Apple is saying they’re above the churn of the news cycle, and if you don’t understand that yet, they don’t care. You’ll either get it through your head eventually, or you will never understand Apple.

Judging from my inbox, Twitter and Messages, people are losing
their minds over iOS 7 and some of the changes Apple introduced at
WWDC last week. Here is my advice to you — sit back, take a deep
breath and relax.

There are a few things you need to remember about iOS 7. First,
it’s nowhere near finished in terms of design or functionality.
Apple engineers stopped adding or changing the operating system
before WWDC so they had a stable build to show during the keynote.
It’s not done.

iOS 7 is so far from done that maybe there is a story here, in that Apple has a mountain of work ahead to get iOS 7 ready for actual release this fall (presumably, coincident with the release of new iPhone and iPad devices). But to judge iOS 7 beta 1 as you would a release version is silly.

Sunday, 16 June 2013

My thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Squarespace puts world-class design in your hands and provides everything you need to create your own website in minutes. Squarespace websites are different. They’re designed to be simple, modern, and to look great on every device. With Squarespace, your personality, products, or content are always the focus.

Friday, 14 June 2013

Apple has set fire to iOS. Everything’s in flux. Those with the least to lose have the most to gain, because this fall, hundreds of millions of people will start demanding apps for a platform with thousands of old, stale players and not many new, nimble alternatives. If you want to enter a category that’s crowded on iOS 6, and you’re one of the few that exclusively targets iOS 7, your app can look better, work better, and be faster and cheaper to develop than most competing apps.

Recorded earlier this week in front of a live audience in San Francisco, I was joined on stage by Guy English, Scott Simpson, and a cavalcade of very special surprise guests. I’m pretty happy with how this show turned out.

We’ll have so many more thoughts on the way related to iOS 7,
but we thought we’d start with the eerily similar lock screens.
Floating bubble live wallpaper, minimal clock, fading on the
actionable icons, semi-Roboto font, etc.

Tuesday, 11 June 2013

The truth about the greatest commercial of all time — Think
Different — is that the intended audience was Apple itself. Jobs
took over a demoralized company on the precipice of bankruptcy,
and reminded them that they were special, and, that Jobs was
special. It was the beginning of a new chapter.

“Designed in California” should absolutely be seen in the same
light. This is a commercial for Apple on the occasion of a new
chapter; we just get to see it.

This morning, I watched the videos of the iOS 7 interface again,
and I saw a bunch of rushed designers unable to stabilize an
uneven interface. It’s worth remembering that Ive took over
Human Interface only 7 months ago, and they redesigned the whole
phone in that time. Straight up: seven months is a ridiculous
deadline.

Astute take on iOS 7’s design by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, writing for Gizmodo:

The predicted rebirth Susan Kare’s original black-and-white OS
design, it ain’t. Actually, let’s just ban using the term “flat”
altogether for this post. The iOS 7 we met today was full of what
Jony Ive called “new types of depth.” Alongside a poppy,
neon-and-pastel color scheme, the icons, apps, and homescreen of
iOS 7 are full of layering and dimensionality. There are also
entirely new types of animation: from a screen that uses the
accelerometer to adjust in parallax, to beautiful new animated
weather icons.

Things went downhill from there. Under Snyder’s questioning,
Turvey acknowledged that he couldn’t remember a single name of
any of the publishing executives who had told him Apple was the
reason the publishers were switching their business model. He
conceded that the publisher’s move to the agency system was
important to Google’s own fledgling book business, yet Turvey
couldn’t remember any details about the conversations with
publishers. By the end of the interview Turvey had gone from
saying the publishers had told him directly, to saying they had
merely told people on his team, to finally saying the publishers
had “likely” told someone on his team.

It was a topsy Turvey moment for the increasingly unsure Google
exec. For Snyder and Apple it was one of those rare times when a
trial opponent is practically defenseless. Mercifully, Cote
adjourned saying “Let’s allow Mr. Turvey to escape so he can enjoy
his Thursday.”

Below, I have carefully parsed Yahoo’s statement, line by line, in order to highlight the fact that Yahoo has not in fact denied receiving court orders under 50 USC 1881a (AKA FISA Section 702) for massive amounts of communications data.

Saturday, 8 June 2013

If it had, even if I couldn’t talk about it, in all likelihood I would no longer be working at Google: the fact that we do stand up for individual users’ privacy and protection, for their right to have a personal life which is not ever shared with other people without their consent, even when governments come knocking at our door with guns, is one of the two most important reasons that I am at this company: the other being a chance to build systems which fundamentally change and improve the lives of billions of people by turning the abstract power of computing into something which amplifies and expands their individual, mental life.

We cannot say this more clearly — the government does not have access to Google servers—not directly, or via a back door, or a so-called drop box. Nor have we received blanket orders of the kind being discussed in the media.

Special guest John Moltz joins me for a pre-WWDC episode of my podcast, The Talk Show. We start with WWDC speculation: Will there be new Macs? Might Apple release an SDK and App Store for Apple TV, and if so, would it require a new remote control? All that and more, including this week’s allegations that the NSA is spying on US citizens’ cell phone usage and Internet data.
You’re going to love the ending.

Friday, 7 June 2013

We have a different name because we make a different sandwich. A true Philly hoagie is so much better than a “sub”, it’s not even funny. We’re famous for the cheesesteak, but the Philly hoagie is just as great. (Sarcone’s is the best; Primo’s are excellent too.)

From the outside, then, it’s easy to be dismissive or even
resentful: How can these guys launch a relatively expensive
text-note app that’s missing so many features of competing
text-note apps?

Balls.

It takes balls to release an iOS app in 2013 for $4.99.

It takes balls to enter this extremely crowded category.

It takes balls to release a note-shoebox app in 2013 that has no
sync, import, or export.

It takes balls to name your note-shoebox app after a cocktail
nobody has heard of, then to age-rate the app “12+ for mild
alcohol references” just so the cocktail’s recipe can be included
in the Credits screen.

An astute review of the app, and an interview with yours truly at the end:

Federico Viticci: In a talk you gave at Macworld in January 2009,
you mentioned how you didn’t work well with other people in a
team. Fast forward to 2013, you have teamed up with Brent and Dave
for Vesper. What’s changed?

John Gruber: Great question. I’m not sure what my exact words were
then, but the way I’d put it now is that I don’t work well with
people I don’t like, or with people who don’t seem to get what I
want. […] The three of us make a good team, that’s the difference.
The big thing is that all three of us are willing to try anything,
and to take however long it takes to get it right. Iterate,
iterate, iterate; over, and over, and over. Dave designed certain
elements of Vesper dozens of times. Brent implemented many of the
features and animated transitions numerous times, just so we could
try different designs and see what they really felt like each way.
And not only did neither of them mind this, they loved it. Brent
even devised a custom framework for the app to provide us with
CSS-like tweaking for things like layout, color, and animation
timings.

It’s simple enough not to get in my way with a lot of fiddly
organizational features, but provides me with more structure than
something like the Notes app. Tagging notes made a lot of sense —
I immediately made Work, Writing, and Recipes tags. I commingled
work notes, ideas for my novel, a favorite recipe for buttermilk
biscuits, and an idea for my podcast without any trouble. Once I
started treating it as the iPhone equivalent of a small paper
notebook tucked into a pocket, it all began to fit.

Yours truly, in an interview with Snell:

“Bond’s gadgets have always been at the intersection of utility
and elegance,” Gruber said. “That’s as good a motto for a software
company as any.”

The gist of the defense was that, in contrast to what took place
under the Bush Administration, this form of secret domestic
surveillance was legitimate because Congress had authorized it,
and the judicial branch had ratified it, and the actual words
spoken by one American to another were still private. So how bad
could it be?

The answer, according to the mathematician and former Sun
Microsystems engineer Susan Landau, whom I interviewed while
reporting on the plight of the former N.S.A. whistleblower Thomas
Drake and who is also the author of Surveillance or Security?,
is that it’s worse than many might think.

“The public doesn’t understand,” she told me, speaking about
so-called metadata. “It’s much more intrusive than content.” She
explained that the government can learn immense amounts of
proprietary information by studying “who you call, and who they
call. If you can track that, you know exactly what is happening —
you don’t need the content.”

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr.
Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any
power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we
have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear
after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who
mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of
unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

Tight security restrictions at Thursday’s Google shareholder
meeting led even the company’s much-hyped Google Glass technology
to be banned, infuriating a consumer watchdog group who accused
the tech giant of hypocrisy.

The Post previously claimed that Microsoft, Yahoo, Google,
Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple ”participate
knowingly”. The phrase that stood out in the report (it has been
repurposed by numerous tech blogs and news sites across the
Web) since it suggested that US firms willingly agreed to a
process that — at best — could violate the rights of millions in
the US if their data is accidentally monitored by the NSA.

Hours after the news broke, and every company bar PalTalk and AOL
denied any knowledge of the program and allegations of their
involvement, the Post has changed its stance. The phrase
”participate knowingly” has been removed from the article, a new
passage suggests the firms were unaware of PRISM.

Speaking of podcasts, I’m doing a live episode of The Talk Show this coming Tuesday in San Francisco, during WWDC. The first batch of tickets sold out, but we just put another 150 on sale. Grab them while they’re hot.

Guy English and Rene Ritchie were both beta testers of Vesper; a few days ago they had Brent Simmons, Dave Wiskus, and me on their podcast, Debug, to talk about Vesper. We talk about almost everything: how we collaborated, the tools we used, “flat” design, accessibility, app pricing, and more. Oh, and Mad Men. It was a lot of fun.

Yesterday there were some allegations made about whether
Apple is intentionally throttling cellular data throughput on
iPhones and iPads via some files used for network provisioning.
The original source post has since been deleted, so I am linking
to the always-awesome Tmonews instead. The reality is that this is
simply not the case. […]

There’s no arbitrary capping of UE Category (User Equipment speed
category), throttling on-device, or anything else that would
prevent the device from attaching and taking full advantage of
whatever the network wants to handshake with. If you’re going to
read anything, just take that away with you, as the full
explanation gets technical fast. If you’re willing, however, let’s
walk through it.

Apple Inc is gearing up to sell audio ads on a music-streaming
service it intends to unveil at its developers conference next
week, according to people familiar with the plan, going up against
Google Inc and Pandora Media Inc in the increasingly competitive
market for mobile tunes.

So Google’s streaming music is a paid service, and Apple’s is going to be free with ads. Got it. Wait, what?

Michael Jurewitz, in part one of his excellent series on App Store pricing, compared the prices of apps in the Top Paid (most downloads) vs. Top Grossing (most revenue) in the Mac App Store:

It would seem there really is a substantial difference between
this data. In fact, if we take a look at the percentages, apps on
the Top Grossing list are, on average, 294% more expensive than
apps on the Top Paid list. Meanwhile, the median price of an app
on the Top Grossing list (again, the middle of the dataset) is
329% more expensive than the Top Paid list.

That’s what Russell Grandinetti, Amazon’s vice president for
Kindle content, said when asked in court Friday about a meeting he
attended in Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Seattle boathouse on Sunday
Jan. 24, 2010. It was the only question in more than four hours of
testimony that Grandinetti declined to answer. […]

Although Grandinetti wouldn’t say anything about the meeting in
Bezos’ boathouse — not even if Bezos attended it — documents
presented into evidence showed that the next day, Jan. 25, Amazon
began developing its own terms for an agency contract.

I don’t get it. If he’s under oath, how does he get to just decline to answer questions?

The Bing Translator app is based on years of Microsoft Research’s
investments in advancing machine learning — a way to find
patterns that humans can’t see, helping people interpret the words
and worlds around them.

Translating content whether browsed, typed or scanned is nearly
instantaneous. Just point your device’s camera at printed text and
watch as the translation is automatically overlaid over the video
stream — creating subtitles for everyday life. You can also type
to translate with your keyboard and hear translations spoken with
a native speaker’s accent.

John August wants Apple to eliminate the “top charts” from the App Store:

These lists — a sidebar in iTunes, a tab on the App Store — show
what’s downloaded the most. But let’s not mistake downloads for
popularity. These are apps that people may have downloaded, used
once, then deleted. What you really want is a list that shows what
apps that people like you are using and enjoying. That’s the kind
of information that companies like Amazon and Netflix are terrific
at leveraging.

Wednesday, 5 June 2013

But, to a certain extent, it’s become a catch-22: Developers are
pricing their apps too cheaply, because that’s what they think
people will actually pay. And so long as they’re right, we as
cheap customers are having a negative impact on a lot of both real
and potential businesses.

But these days they’re almost beholden to ask the ‘what’s next’
questions that everyone expects every year. If they don’t ask
them, everyone will complain about them not doing so, and yet
everyone complains when the same questions get the same
non-answers. It’s got to be a tough position to be in. But my
feeling on this, and I think that it’s shared by people both
inside and outside of Apple, is that it’s time to start asking him
better stuff.

The result of this can be seen in a series of videos from Cook’s
visit to the Duke Fuqua School of Business that he filmed in April
but were released just this week. The clips are a must watch. Cook
talks about what he wants in employees, how to lead, how to
collaborate and touches on several other great topics. There’s
very little Apple specific stuff, though he mentions the company,
but there’s a bunch of really interesting philosophical and
tactical information that I’ve never heard him speak about
anywhere else.

Asking Tim Cook (or any other Apple executive) questions you know he isn’t going to answer isn’t being a “tough” journalist. It’s just a waste of time and a rare opportunity. Sure, ask him up front if he’s willing to talk about upcoming Apple products, get his “no” on the record. But then move on to questions he might actually answer.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama
administration the communication records of millions of US
citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk —
regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) granted
the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited
authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period
ending on July 19.

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties
on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration,
unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The
contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

Brutal. And especially galling from a president who was a constitutional law scholar.

“We believe Samsung on the strength of strong Galaxy S4, S III,
and Note II sales surpassed Apple to gain top share of the U.S.
smartphone market for the first time since the iPhone 5 launch,”
said Michael Walkley, the Canaccord Genuity analyst who conducted
the survey.

That may look like a milestone, but the report should be taken
with a grain of salt. The survey doesn’t include Apple’s retail
stores, where many iPhones are sold.

138.5 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones (58 percent
mobile market penetration) during the three months ending in
April, up 7 percent since January. Apple ranked as the top OEM
with 39.2 percent of U.S. smartphone subscribers (up 1.4
percentage points from January). Samsung ranked second with 22
percent market share (up 0.6 percentage points), followed by
HTC with 8.9 percent, Motorola with 8.3 percent and LG with
6.7 percent.

App Camp for Girls wants to address the gender imbalance among
software developers by giving girls the chance to learn how to
build apps, to be inspired by women instructors, and to get
exposure to software development as a career. Our goal is to grow
our non-profit organization into a national force, with programs
in multiple cities, helping thousands of girls.

Who among you haven’t wondered how many dried tears it would take
to fill a salt shaker or how long it would take to sip an
Olympic-sized pool through a straw? Doubtless, you’re similarly
inclined to have contemplated the size of the screen that could be
made if the displays were ripped out of every iPhone ever sold and
combined into a single colossus. It’s likely still that you’ve
imagined how it might appear looming above the Manhattan skyline.
Wonder no more. Armed with pencil and paper, this exercise has
been made with you in mind.

Tuesday, 4 June 2013

Sketchnote Text, Italic and Bold were built from hundreds of
hand-drawn glyphs, and variations on glyphs. These added
characters allowed Delve to create Contextual Alternates —
multiple variations on each character which help recreate
variations in handwriting and can be accessed with tools that
support this OpenType feature, like InDesign.

Next year, the National Football League will begin to show Sunday
afternoon games from customers’ home markets on Verizon Wireless
phones, adding more of television’s most valuable content to the
growing inventory that users can watch on mobile devices. The
league is already showing games from Sunday, Monday and Thursday
nights on Verizon phones. Typically, only one game is played on
those nights, while about 10 to 12 are played across the country
on Sunday afternoons.

Verizon Wireless will pay the NFL $1 billion over four years,
according to a person with direct knowledge of the terms.

That is nearly 40% more than Verizon agreed to pay when it signed
the current four-year, $720 million agreement in 2010, a growth
rate similar to what the NFL and other sports leagues have
received in their latest TV deals.

The first rule of law, goes the old lawyers joke, is that if the
facts are against you, you argue the law. The second rule is that
if the law is against you, you argue the facts. Based on each
side’s opening arguments on the first day of U.S.A. v. Apple, it’s
clear that the Department of Justice is leaning heavily on the
facts and Apple on the law.

New iPhone camera app that does one thing and does it well: high-contrast black-and-white photography (reminiscent, dare I say, of the late lamented Gotham filter). I’ve been beta testing it, and gottensomegoodshots with it over the past month. A steal at $1.99.

Frustration with patent trolls, and momentum for reform, has been
building for some time now. Today, the stakes got even higher when
the White House announced that it was actively taking on the troll
problem. This is big news, and not just because of the seven
legislative proposals the White House recommends (more on those
below). Even more important are the five executive actions the
President intends to take with or without congressional help.

The news here is good.

Monday, 3 June 2013

Julian Assange reviews Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s new book, The New Digital Age, for the NYT:

I have a very different perspective. The advance of information
technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for
most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism. This is
the principal thesis in my book, Cypherpunks. But while Mr.
Schmidt and Mr. Cohen tell us that the death of privacy will aid
governments in “repressive autocracies” in “targeting their
citizens,” they also say governments in “open” democracies will
see it as “a gift” enabling them to “better respond to citizen and
customer concerns.” In reality, the erosion of individual privacy
in the West and the attendant centralization of power make abuses
inevitable, moving the “good” societies closer to the “bad” ones.

The BBC Trust today responded to a complaint the broadcaster
favored iOS devices when it comes to adding features to its
catch-up on demand iPlayer service for Android phones. This
complaint was rejected because the Trust found “no evidence” to
suggest iOS had been “unfairly favored.”

Instead of pro-Apple favouritism, the Trust found a series of
quite logical reasons why Android lagged iOS when new features
were added to iPlayer, mostly surrounding the “complexity and
expense” of developing for Android.

The company also noted a couple of other logical reasons why
developers dealing with limited time and budget would opt for
Apple’s mobile OS:

Engagement is higher on Apple devices

Android is fragmented

Android development is complex and expensive

OK, but other than that, how did you enjoy developing for Android, Mrs. Lincoln?

Where do you go when you’ve already turned it up to 11? That’s the
problem pundits face now, after piling on Apple for months. First,
we’ll see an example of someone bending the fabric of reality to
get over that hurdle and then we’ll see how you can make an
anti-Apple article with really no evidence at all!

Depressing news. This makes no more sense than if they fired all their reporters and trained the photographers in “news writing basics”. They should be hiring more and better photographers, doubling-down on content quality.

Court documents unsealed this week reveal who’s behind FlatWorld,
and it’s anything but typical. FlatWorld is partly owned by the
named inventor on the patents, a Philadelphia design professor
named Slavko Milekic. But 35 percent of the company has been
quietly controlled by an attorney at one of Apple’s own go-to law
firms, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. E-mail logs show that the
attorney, John McAleese, worked together with his wife and began
planning a wide-ranging patent attack against Apple’s touch-screen
products in January 2007 — just days after the iPhone was
revealed to the world.

Jennifer McAleese reached out to numerous “troll patent”
companies, as she called them, convinced that she and Milekic had
an “excellent position against Apple” if and when they chose to
sue. She e-mailed top patent lawyers at Google and Nokia,
competitors known to be in patent clashes with Apple.

The whole time she was advised by her husband, a lawyer who had
access to reams of confidential Apple data — but who says he
never touched it. (Apple doesn’t see it that way.) Together, the
McAleeses created “an indirect and covert pipeline” of information
pumped to FlatWorld’s attorneys according to Apple lawyers.

Asus has long offered a line of Android tablets that slot into
keyboard docks, but at its Computex press conference it announced
it would be taking this concept one step further. Its new
Transformer Book Trio is a tablet running Android (an unspecified
version of Jelly Bean, to be a bit more precise); when docked, it
becomes a Haswell-equipped Windows 8 Ultrabook.

While it is still at odds with some music companies over deal
terms, Apple is said to be eager to get the licenses in time to
unveil the service — nicknamed iRadio by the technology press —
at its annual developers conference, which begins June 10 in San
Francisco.

Apple has signed a deal with the Universal Music Group for its
recorded music rights, but not for music publishing — the part of
the business that deals with songwriting. Over the weekend, Apple
also signed a deal with the Warner Music Group for both rights. It
is still in talks with Sony Music Entertainment and Sony’s
separate publishing arm, Sony/ATV, whose songwriters include
Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.